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Like a beggar seeding the pot, I will throw in this one I made the other day for the "underwater city" thread, which seems to have been abandoned by the OP. I am most pleased that I finally found a way to use the "light sensitive" material option. The harder the lights shine, the higher the density of the material - for added murk.

* * *

The Kraken, by Alfred Tennyson

Below the thunders of the upper deep;
Far far beneath in the abysmal sea,
His ancient, dreamless, uninvaded sleep
The Kraken sleepeth: faintest sunlights flee
About his shadowy sides; above him swell
Huge sponges of millennial growth and height;
And far away into the sickly light,
From many a wondrous grot and secret cell
Unnumber’d and enormous polypi
Winnow with giant arms the slumbering green.
There hath he lain for ages, and will lie
Battening upon huge seaworms in his sleep,
Until the latter fire shall heat the deep;
Then once by man and angels to be seen,
In roaring he shall rise and on the surface die.

@David: Your last image in the last render thread looks like something see on monitors in Sci-Fi movies. Looks neat. Your latest underwater looks great. The light prism affect on the toppled statue is a nice touch.

Great render. I don't particularly like the subject matter because of what it implies, but the render is excellent.

Thanks Horo. I'm glad you like the render.
Maybe the subject matter isn't implying what you think it is, though I usually like to leave interpretation up to the viewer.

When I was setting it up I had in mind last year's events in Egypt where due to the Arab Spring revolutions the treasures of Egypt were pillaged by people taking advantage of the country not having any Government or law authorities.

@ TheSavage64 the pyramids look fab against the haze and the color is stunning, The tanks create a disturbing slant to the image that reminds me of war and peace

Thanks :)

Though I'm not exactly sure of what make and model the tanks are, I'm quite sure they aren't contemporary to either of the world wars.
In their original livery (which I substituted for rust) they were UN badged... but like I just said to Horo, the viewer's interpretation is more important than the artists intent. :)

Well since Dave got me thinking about the role of haze I've been tinkering around with that. The first image, I wanted the focus on the terrains hence leaving the sky empty. TA render, 10 minutes, standard Bryce sun is the primary lights source. Soft shadows 15. Island material used for the terrain. I wasn't keen on the water. So had another go... Again 10 minute TA render. Almost the same setup. However, I used the spherical mapper to capture the Big Sur sky from the free could scene provided with 7.0 and changed the water. And threw in one of the fine Stanford scanning repository models to act as some kind of focus.

Keryna, thank you, subtle and simple render. It is the sparse scenes I like the best. The less complex they are the more attention that can be lavished on everything else. The iridescent shell material complements the sky very well.

Dave, the tank scene looks amiss. I think maybe because we are looking right into the sun and yet it is not very bright. The fading of the pyramids into golden haze is nice. The range of contrasts is good. The echo of the three tanks with the three pyramids is fine. I think if the sun really looked like it was burning into the camera, maybe with some lens flare... maybe not. I'm never sure about lens flare.

Silverdali, beautiful crisp render, I could easily imagine this as a frame in an animation.

@David - landscape looks very nice. There is still that faint haze line where the Bryce horizon is.

The Lens Flare... OK, I can do that easily enough.
:-)

For me, definitive an improvement towards the bad. I prefer the first shot because if the atmosphere contains a lot of sand, the sun is dimmed. Sahara sand in the high atmosphere sometimes comes north to central Europe and dims the sun and tints the landscape into a yellowish-red colour. And those Photosop lens flares just don't look natural. I have yet to see a lens that gives such perfectly round lens flares.

Dave, lens flare... no, no. NO! What were you thinking? What was I thinking? Clearly I was wrong.

Horo, that band of haze is above the horizon in this case, that is the top of the haze, I wanted to give the effect of the haze being settled and the tops of the hills poking out of the top. Obviously this didn't quite work.

I know the lens flare doesn't work, that's why I used the grinning yellow bloke and only took 30 seconds to do it. :-)

Although I must say the actual sun part does look slightly more convincing to me bleached out and blurred, the lens flare rings are a distraction that like Horo says, don't look much like real lens flare at all.

If you were to render a version of the Egyptian army (rather than the British) defending the ancient relics against Salafist attentions, you could use one of these:http://www.daz3d.com/shop/m2a2-bradley-ods
which isn't a bad model (shown below in non-Egyptian colours). The Egyptians mostly use the older M113 tracked IFV fitted with the Bradley turret, as well as lots of wheeled APCs.

Having said all that twaddle, I think the vague armoured vehicles suit the arty image nicely and convey your intention well (which I got, btw - the weapons are pointed outwards).

Lighting: nine conical lights and one spherical. Tried volumetric lighting as per Dan’s fog cube setup, however, too many light rays ‘wash-out’ the scene (experimenting, therefore, a recommendation). Main light is behind the camera, and is affecting shadow intensity in areas like, for example, the cushion on the ground, leading edge of carpet, chair etc.,...and other areas (click image for larger view on these). Again, more experiementation required, however, for now, this is a finished work.

Looks good to me Jay.... I especially like the very natural looking contrast of the hard and soft shadows where the shadow from the chair and the window frame merge against the right wall.

You mention how you lit it but surely there's also Bryce sun involved?
If you're trying to achieve the same effect that Dan got with light beams shining in through the window (from the sun), maybe give it another go but turn the intensity of the sun right down? Yes the lights bouncing off the volumetric haze could have the effect of bleaching out, but I think a balance between sunlight intensity and haze amount could get past that problem.

Every time I've tried the volumetric world, it brings Bryce to a standstill. When the feature was first introduced in Bryce I did a simple render (typical palm tree island lit from behind) using volumetric world and for such a simple scene it took 14 hours to render.... I'll see if I can find it later, the resulting effect was subtle to say the least. :)

@PJF; Thanks for all that info.
Yes the tank (or APV as it turns out :cheese:) is a very low res freebie, from this website, which is an invaluable resource for thousands of little bits and pieces to import into Bryce and play with.

Well since Dave got me thinking about the role of haze I've been tinkering around with that. The first image, I wanted the focus on the terrains hence leaving the sky empty. TA render, 10 minutes, standard Bryce sun is the primary lights source. Soft shadows 15. Island material used for the terrain. I wasn't keen on the water. So had another go... Again 10 minute TA render. Almost the same setup. However, I used the spherical mapper to capture the Big Sur sky from the free could scene provided with 7.0 and changed the water. And threw in one of the fine Stanford scanning repository models to act as some kind of focus.

Coming back to this David...

Personally I think the first one is better, though the reflection of the clouds certainly lifts the water in the second one.
Can I ask, what sort of scale do you usually use when setting up a scene, say in relation to the default ground plane square.
Sometimes I end up making my terrain massive in relation to that in order to get a good atmosphere going on and other times not.

One really good thing about Carrara (I flirted with it last year) is when you set up a new document you get to choose what scale you're going to be working at and your choice there determines what units of measurement you use and sets things in scale. But when working in Bryce I don't really ever consider scale on the various elements as I make them, meaning that I regularly encounter problems of placing an object from my library into a scene to find it's for instance, a giant washing machine. I know it's not much trouble to then just re-size it but I've often wondered if others use a consistent scale for their work.

One really good thing about Carrara (I flirted with it last year) is when you set up a new document you get to choose what scale you're going to be working at and your choice there determines what units of measurement you use and sets things in scale. But when working in Bryce I don't really ever consider scale on the various elements as I make them, meaning that I regularly encounter problems of placing an object from my library into a scene to find it's for instance, a giant washing machine. I know it's not much trouble to then just re-size it but I've often wondered if others use a consistent scale for their work.

Size matters, particularly for outdoors when haze is used. I seldom start with a terrain smaller than 1000 BU. Often, I set 1 BU=1km and then I have a scale. Bryce doesn't have that feature of scaling as Carrara does, but you can still scale it by assigning a particular unit to a BU. If you set 1 BU = 1 m, you can go directly down to 1 mm. There is a bit of calculation involved if you prefer miles, feet, inches.